Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  “I kindle fire. You find wood.”

  Keen though he was to see how Agaratz made fire, Urrell did as bidden and was soon back with an armful of dry twigs and cones from beneath the nearest firs. Agaratz was twirling a fire-stick in a hollow log and already blowing on tinder till it flared. Several times Urrell was sent to fetch more fuel, Agaratz intent on building up substantial heat. Urrell expected him to thrust the joint into the flames or dangle it over; instead he built up a bed of embers.

  “Now cook.”

  He parted the embers with two stones till the glowing mass lay open before Urrell’s inquisitive eyes. Agaratz placed a flat, much-blackened stone in the bottom of the hearth, placed the joint on top, drew the embers over and squatted to wait. Urrell had never seen this done, nor had his surprise gone unnoticed. When he glanced at Agaratz he saw in the crookback’s eyes that playful gleam, like the one when he had astonished Urrell with his handstand, a look which said, ‘See, another trick you did not know’.

  It was a trick worth knowing; Urrell’s nose twitched and his stomach rumbled at the savoury smells rising from the roast. When he judged it done, Agaratz scraped away the embers and with two pointed sticks speared the meat and placed it on a flat stone, as Urrell followed every move. First he brushed off ashes and coals then, from a belt pouch, produced a flint knife, longer than a man’s handspan, exquisitely knapped to a fine edge from the same reddish stone as his javelin points, and with it sawed the joint in two, half for Urrell, half for himself, handing the lad his share skewered on one of the roasting sticks.

  In companionable silence they set to, Urrell savouring a feast he would long remember.

  But it was not yet over. Agaratz surprised Urrell again by producing from his pouch a bark bundle which, unfolded, revealed most of a honeycomb. He halved the delicacy with the same flint knife and gave Urrell one piece and kept the other – something no man in his own tribe would have done. Urrell wavered before the offer, expecting a cuff if he reached out for it.

  “Take, Urrell. For you. I bring for you.” Then, perhaps to coax him the better, he said, “Etzi” in his own tongue.

  “Honeycomb.”

  “Ah, honeycomb,” repeated Agaratz, savouring the new word.

  “Etzi,” said Urrell, in the same spirit. Their eyes met in a look of complicity and Urrell saw an expression new to him on a human face: a sly grin, part fun, part knowingness, part mockery, which gave him a curious sense of pleasure and comfort, so that he laughed as he never had before and clapped his hands. This incited Agaratz to do another handstand round the fire, then drop on all fours and begin mimicking the gait and movements of different animals, delighting the boy who called out the names of the creatures being imitated, identifying them from the performances before him: “horse – foal – mare in foal – boar – sow with young – bear – buck – doe – stork…”

  Plainly his pleasure redoubled the performer’s, encouraging Agaratz to move from mimickry to imitating the calls, grunts, sounds made by each animal with such accuracy as to make Urrell think, eyes closed, that the beast was in the shelter. His repertoire seemed to include all creation. At least all creation that the boy knew – until Agaratz rose on his toes and knuckles, rounded his back even more than his hump made it, and circled Urrell on toes and knuckles with a rolling, massive gait, rocking from side to side, burbling and rumbling, till without warning he emitted a blaring trumpeting that echoed out of the shelter into the woods, startling Urrell from his happy state.

  Urrell was lost. His puzzlement pleased Agaratz.

  “You not know what is that?”

  “No.”

  “Is ummook. Look, I draw.”

  With a twig, in one swift, continuous line Agaratz drew a mammoth, raising the twig only to sketch in the tusks of a big bull and to hatch in a hint of his hairy flank.

  Urrell hopped about with excitement. “Mammurak, mammurak,” he almost shouted, the word from Old Mother’s language, the only name he knew for the great beast. Her word. It reminded the boy of her, the old woman who had befriended a small boy when no-one cared whether he lived or died. Her cackle of laughter when they were alone. Sometimes the men laughed, but it was the laughter of bullies, of males guffawing at others’ falls, laughing at a woman nursing a wrist broken in a beating, at a small creature wounded to use as target practice. If the women laughed it was in scorn of one another, spiteful.

  Old Mother. Her last season before the cold.

  “Where are the ummook? Where?”

  The boy’s eagerness about this beast seemed to amuse Agaratz. The sly, elfish grin Urrell would grow to recognise flitted across the long face framed by reddish sideburns over the ears.

  “Ummook, ummook,” he echoed, “ummook long long way.” One hand made an up-and-over movement, as though unrolling immense distances, pointing towards the remote snow-capped mountain range.

  “Agaratz, please, have you seen them, have you seen ummook?”

  “Once I see.” The souvenir did not appear to be a happy one. “When cold times and I small.”

  Then, changing expression, he said with a tone of finality, “Now we go.”

  The preparations were soon done. Watched by Urrell, the mammoth-mimic shinned up his improvised ladder to stow the fire-stick, fire-log, spare tinder and odds and ends of the bundle in the gap under the shelter roof, and came back down the climbing pole, which he hid in the undergrowth outside. He then trod the ashes, some still glowing, the heat not seeming to affect his feet, the club foot or the other, scattered the hearthstones and swept away the mammoth sketch and their footprints with a fir branch till the shelter floor looked as though no-one had been there for months.

  Urrell wondered why but did not ask. His own clan hunters never troubled to hide their passage.

  When all was as he wanted, after a last glance round, Agaratz led the way onwards in the same direction as before, broadly parallel with the cliffs which were gradually becoming lower. The forest scene was changing too, the fir trees giving way to ash, beech, oak and their accompanying understorey, more like the woodlands Urrell was accustomed to.

  CHAPTER 5

  As they went on, Agaratz grew warier, pausing occasionally to listen; the boy obediently stopping too. Apart from a few bird sounds there seemed to be nothing to hear. Although they saw deer, always at a distance, game was less plentiful than in Urrell’s home valley. In any case, Agaratz was evidently not bent on hunting but on arriving at his destination. Whatever it was that kept Agaratz alert remained invisible.

  In this unquestioning way Urrell kept behind his guide, hunter fashion. By nightfall the cliff-face, which had been declining in height, was little more a than a long bluff, broken by scrub-filled gullies. Streams became more frequent and the wooded landscape through which they had been travelling opened into grassland interspersed with clumps of trees.

  Agaratz paused, crouched and pointed towards a bluff. “Cave: you come.”

  At this, Urrell scanned the bluff for signs of life, expecting the tell-tale smoke of cooking fires, a hint of movement. But there was nothing. This was so much against his boyish experience that he exclaimed in surprise, “Where are your people?”He remembered those bison hunters. “Were the bison hunters from your people?

  “No. From far.”

  Agaratz being obviously disinclined to expand on the matter, the boy kept his questions to himself.

  They now moved forward again, Agaratz no longer wary. He turned towards the bluff, leading the way through the scrub at its foot till a cleft appeared, scarcely noticeable a spear’s cast away, and entered it. Urrell followed. There were none of the signs of life that indicated a home camp – no rubbish, no trampled plants, no smoke. It must be another of Agaratz’s camps, like the one they had eaten at earlier that day.

  The cleft angled sharp left and opened out into a sort of small gulch, a self-contained and hidden patch of grass and scrub surrounded by rock walls. In the left-hand rock-face the opening to a small cave cou
ld be seen, well beyond reach, at twice the height of the tallest man.

  “You stay, Urrell.”

  Agaratz searched among the bushes at the foot of the rock-face to lift out a climbing-pole, as he had done at the earlier shelter, and propped it beneath the cave entrance. It was over twice the height of that first one. Was Agaratz about to toss down another roast, more fire-making material?

  “You follow, Urrell.” Agaratz swarmed up the pole, his club foot no hindrance. With his pouch and spears, the boy followed, feeling less nimble.

  When they were both up Agaratz hauled in the climbing pole and laid it along one side of the cave, a cave which Urrell saw was the entrance to a gallery that disappeared into the bluff. Its floor was clear of all litter. Ranged round the walls were bundles and piles of objects, shadowy in the gloom. He squatted, not knowing what to expect. His trust in Agaratz was complete, but was this just another resting place on the way to the tribal camp of his people? It looked more permanent than the camp they had stopped at earlier yet he could not fathom why there were no hints of anyone else using the place. Why there were no signs of hunting parties coming and going? He would wait to ask.

  “You want eat, Urrell?”

  Agaratz was ferreting among things in a recess as he spoke.

  Urrell recognised another fire-log, tinder and a hardened fire-stick. The stick twirled with a deftness that entranced the boy, the tinder soon smouldered, was blown alight and twigs added to start a fire in a hearth Urrell now discerned against a wall. He glimpsed the sly grin on the long face lit by the first flames.

  “You make fire next time, Urrell.”

  In his home clan, an old woman kept the fire alight, her role to carry the fire-log with its embers on the long trek to the upland hunting grounds in spring and back down in the autumn when the snows drove the clan to the lowlands and the sea shore. Woe betide the fire-keeper who let the embers die. Re-kindling was not easy. Urrell knew it was done, but never had any of his tribe conjured up fire so magically, so effortlessly, as Agaratz had before his dazzled eyes.

  He was to be shown how. His breast swelled with pride. “Tomorrow I make fire, Agaratz?”

  “Yes, now I cook.” Agaratz pulled out bundles of bone-dry twigs from a pile and built up an almost smokeless fire against the wall. Urrell’s people used a hearth away from the wall, always the same.

  In the firelight Urrell made out side entrances and recesses, as well as piles and bundles around their sides. Yet more bundles hung from pegs and from frames made of boughs. There was a permanence about the arrangements. Agaratz must live here much of the time. But where were his kin?

  Urrell saw too, from the blackened wall, that this was the regular hearth – though not in the propitious mid-rear of the shelter. Another puzzle. Old Mother would have known the answer, keeper of the flame in the true spot the spirits knew.

  Tomorrow he would learn to make fire; Urrell the fire-maker-to-be.

  Agaratz was fanning the blaze with a leafy branch, dispersing the little smoke the fire made. He was crouched in profile, lit by the flames, the club foot, almost cloven, was turned towards Urrell, with its hairy shin.

  “You eat perretxiko?”

  “Perretxiko?”

  “Like… like mushroom.”

  Urrell knew some funguses could be eaten, some not. At certain times, the women gathered them when they went berrying, if game was scarce or the men’s hunting had failed. It was not men’s fare; hunters spurned funguses unless driven by extreme hunger. He had learnt from the women which kinds to nibble by following them when he was small and ousted from the camp with stones and cuffs, the lot of orphaned boys everywhere.

  “You eat fungus?” Urrell’s voice must have conveyed boyish disbelief.

  “I eat. They mamu food.”

  “Mamu?”

  “Give strength. Give…” he sought a word in Urrell’s language… “give power.”

  Urrell knew hunters sought hunting powers, held secret rituals that women and boys must not witness, on pain of spearing. Some foods, some signs, weakened power, deflected weapons from their mark. No hunter touched fish, from the water world, because of this. Some foods women might eat, but not men; some men alone might eat. That lore he knew.

  “If it is power food, am I allowed to eat it?”

  “You eat. I let you.”

  The finality of this empowering statement comforted Urrell.

  An idea occurred to the boy. “Agaratz, may you eat fishes?”

  “Fishes, yes.”

  “For my people fish is… like spirit food. Hunters never eat fishes.”

  Somehow he felt he had impressed his protector. The golden eyes rested on him, with a stare devoid of the sly grin, empty of malice or of friendliness, looking beyond him. Urrell crouched still, caught in the stare, a small creature paralysed by a greater. Had he crossed an unseen line, transgressed, as a boy chancing upon hunters’ rites might transgress, unwittingly? He had once seen a boy speared through the legs for this.

  The rank smell, the hidden den. A secret place.

  Then, with the same finality as earlier, Agaratz stated: “I accalarrak. Eat spirit food, fish food, fungus food. One day you be accalarrak. Eat spirit foods.”

  Agaratz raked the embers from the glowing hearth stones and arranged several big white mushrooms, of a kind unknown to Urrell, on them, having first smeared them with grease. When one side was done and the aroma began to tease Urrell’s nostrils, Agaratz turned the mushrooms over with two sticks to sizzle thoroughly. Not till he deemed them done did he spear one for himself and another for Urrell.

  The flavour was something quite new to the boy.

  “You like, Urrell?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You eat before?”

  “Not this kind, not cooked.”

  “You eat not cook?” That impish grin again which told Urrell he had said something odd, boyish. Perhaps eating funguses raw was taboo among Agaratz’s people, like fish among his.

  “Where is your camp?” he asked.

  “This my camp.”

  “But where are your kinfolk?”

  “I no kinfolk. Alone.”

  He said this matter-of-factly.

  “But I saw smoke, before the bison hunters, before you. Who were they?”

  Agaratz looked up from the second toadstool he was spearing for them both. The yellowish eyes fixed on Urrell’s again, making him feel important, he, a boy, the bearer of important information. “I saw it from the clifftop, like mist, but it was smoke.”

  Agaratz pondered the information, nodded to himself but made no comment. Perhaps it explained his wariness in the woods.

  “Now we sleep,” he said.

  Before he could do so, Urrell knew he needed to relieve himself. In his home camp it was no problem. Men stepped out a little; women a little further the other way. Here there was no stepping out, not even to climb down the pole as Agaratz had hauled it up. He wondered what Agaratz would do. He had not long to wait. Agaratz drew aside a curtain of pelts to reveal a recess piled with pine branches and bracken, on top of which were spread several hides including a bison’s. Urrell had never seen the like. “Here sleep,” said his host. “First follow.”

  Taking a brand from the fire as a torch he led Urrell into the gallery till it forked then took the lesser opening, which led to a side chamber. Its use was obvious to Urrell, its earthen floor absorbing the result. A heap of moss and grasses lay nearby, their use evident. Agaratz stuck the torch in a crevice for a sconce, a familiar place, and left Urrell to his needs.

  When Urrell made his way back by the light of the dying brand he found Agaratz hunched by the fire waiting his turn. Urrell wondered at such behaviour, why the crookback should wish to be alone for that.

  “Now we sleep,” said Agaratz on his return. He banked the fire and they both crawled into the recess, Urrell to the back, snuggling into the bracken and pine branches and drawing a pelt over himself. He was asleep in seconds.
/>   When he awoke, Urrell knew with animal immediacy where he was.

  Agaratz was gone. Raising the curtain of skins, he crept out but his host was not in the cave either. He saw that the climbing-pole had been lowered: Agaratz must be outside. Finding Agaratz seemed the first thing to do so he scaled down the pole and set about exploring the little gulch. He soon found a freshet rising from the foot of the cliff, forming a natural basin that overflowed and meandered into the vegetation. Signs showed that the basin was someone’s drinking place, Agaratz’s no doubt, as well as other smaller creatures. He lay on his face and drank from the surface, seeing his face, brown with dirt and sunburn, reflected in the still pool. A fuzz was beginning to darken his upper lip. He ran his finger along the down, pinched it, made faces into the water.

  Thus engaged in self-exploration, he had not heard anyone approaching. A “ho” from Agaratz announced that he had come up silently and was warning him of his presence. “Ho,” answered Urrell, caught unawares.

  Agaratz had been foraging, as a skin held by the four corners to make a carrier revealed when he laid it down for Urrell to inspect. It held several kinds of funguses, several rodents and some raspberries wrapped in big leaves. He watched Urrell’s reactions, with a communicative gleam in those yellow eyes that Urrell had never known in anyone, not even in Fire-crone’s when she took pleasure in explaining things to him, or talked of her girlhood land.

  “Good, now eat,” said Agaratz.

  They went back up the pole and Agaratz revived the fire. As before, he made a rude oven of hot stones to bake the rodents while others served to braise the heads of funguses. Urrell watched all this, between acting as fuel-fetcher from the woodmow, noting every move which, once seen would be recalled perfectly, like spoor. From Agaratz’s manner he knew there would be more to learn: he squatted happily, as happy as those rare times when he and Fire-crone had been alone in camp and she had rambled on about her youth, shown him binding skills, described strange beasts and told him stories of olden times in that mixture of her girlhood tongue and his camp’s which he had grown to understand better than anyone else.